working together to navigate your ever changing work world
maKE LEMONADE OUT OF LEMONSNever have we become fulltime teachers, employees, and caregivers at the same time within the 4 walls of our homes for this extended period! Many in our communities are in need. While your family is together, focusing on project can help with relieving stress and feeling good about helping those who need a hand.
What about a Family & Friends Giving Project for giving back to your community? Utilize those organizations skills that have become honed to help! Think Local – identify organizations in your area that can receive donations like a homeless shelter or food pantry. Check with your friends for suggestions. Form “A Friends and Family Task Force” – Rally others from your social media networks, neighbors, school or work groups to participate. Identify appropriate activities for your team and create an action plan for easy communication. Ask for Donations – Many of your professional and personal contacts may be able to donate items such as non-perishable food, gift cards, cleaning products – every little bit can help! Organize the Collection – identify a centralized drive thru location to drop off items while keeping a safe distance. Deliver the Donations – contact the organization to identify a safe method for delivering the donation Spread the Word – Don’t spread the virus but spread the word of your Family & Friends Giving Project to help encourage others to participate! remote work....our new normalWe are now in a new world of uncertainty. What was normal, will not be a for a while. Today's workplace has been transformed into zoom meetings, managing pets and children while trying to be productive and keeping our jobs. As humans, we have always persevered in the face an adversity and now is not different. Companies have made long strides to ensure that employees have the work tools they need to keep working, states and cities have done their part to protect their citizens and the federal government has passed its latest stimulus bill to ensure that businesses and individuals can continue to pay their bills and keep people employed. What does this new reality mean to you?
To many, it is an opportunity to check into their systems, processes and workflows. To ensure that they have buttoned up their communication and related processes to stay connected to clients and each other. It is an opportunity to ensure connections that are not just physical- think the Netflix series, Love is Blind.... So how and when we get through this is all up to us. Through job guarantees, stress help to ensure emotional health, virtual coffee time with our teams and finding ways to ensure that we keep them up to date as to what we're doing that's got to do with laundry or catching up to the lates binge watching on Hulu! We have been bombarded with requests for help on how to make life at "work' more effective and continue to add resources to our library as we too get used to our new normal. My favourite meme saying: She got her Covid-19 Phd. from Wattsapp University! Be safe and sty home so we can get to the other side of this thing quickly. ATS, what is that....Apple Turnover Sunshine...More like Applicant Tracking System are trending right now; they've been for a little while as companies are realizing the value of implementing one. I am working with a client on whether or not one makes sense for them and here is some of what I offered as a critical component for them as they evaluate what's out there and how a content expert on ATS' can be of value?
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Good Read Alert: Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
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What Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, whom I have been following as one of his first LI members since 2006! says below is so completely true and when you yourself start thinking about the people that you and I most like and want to be around, they probably fit these very 3 characteristics.
Several weeks ago, I shared the above Venn diagram in a status update. With 20k+ likes and comments on LinkedIn and over 2.2k retweets and favorites on Twitter, it's become the most viral update I've shared to date. As a result, thought it might be interesting to provide some additional context on where the diagram came from.
It all started in a meeting where a talented team was presenting their plan for a potentially high impact initiative. Midway through, they covered the measurable results they expected to achieve in three years. Granted, they were being somewhat conservative, but their objectives were still way off what I would have expected them to be targeting based on the addressable opportunity and the assets we were bringing to the table.
Without hesitation, I challenged the team to increase their long-term goal by roughly 20x. Regardless of whether or not they could hit the target (which I think they can), the point was to get them thinking much bigger, without constraints, and to start by asking the question, "What would it take...?"
Dream Big
Oftentimes, my favorite exchanges are with people who are naturally predisposed to think at truly massive scale and without limitations. When well reasoned, that kind of vision can be highly inspirational, change the way teams solve for a specific opportunity or challenge, and ultimately, transform the trajectory of a company. During this particular meeting, I ended up writing down two simple words to capture this quality: "Dream big," with the intention of cascading the theme more broadly.
Get Sh*t Done
Almost immediately after seeing those words in writing, I realized the message was incomplete.The team leading the discussion that day may have been conservative in their approach to articulating what was possible, but they were also highly capable and credible -- and had a proven track record of delivering results. Demanding excellence is an important value for us. It's something I would never want taken for granted or crowded out by the singular objective of thinking at scale. Asking people to dream big without delivering on the vision was not only an incomplete sentiment, it could carry the unintended consequence of producing pie-in-the-sky thinking without anything to show for it.
If a goal is truly visionary, it's going to be confronted by doubters, skeptics, and those threatened by its realization. As a result, there will always be walls put up on the way to achieving the objective. Some of the most capable people I've worked with know how to go over, around, or straight through those walls by virtue of their resourcefulness and sheer force of will. In other words, they just "get sh*t done."
I added those three words to my notes, drew overlapping circles around "Get sh*t done" and "Dream big", and thought about how invaluable it is to work with people at the intersection of the two.
Know How to Have Fun
It then occurred to me that I've known a number of people who embodied the ability to dream big and get sh*t done, but who also proved very difficult to work with. Perhaps shielded by the immense value they brought to their respective organizations, they never cultivated the ability to manage compassionately, or even cared to. Rather, they did things their way and expected everyone around them to adapt accordingly. More often than not, that's exactly what people did.
While this has clearly proven to work at some now legendary companies, it's not an easily scalable or reproducible model, it's not necessary, and in my opinion, it's not fun (I say in my opinion because there are those who will argue that winning is fun, regardless of the means employed).
I've reached a point in my career where I want to be surrounded by people who not only share a vision, but a genuine commitment to upholding their company's culture and values. They are team players, don't take themselves too seriously, and "know how to have fun." And with that, I added a third circle to the Venn diagram.
At the nexus of these three circles are the people I most enjoy working with. I'm extraordinarily grateful to have the opportunity to do that every day.
Several weeks ago, I shared the above Venn diagram in a status update. With 20k+ likes and comments on LinkedIn and over 2.2k retweets and favorites on Twitter, it's become the most viral update I've shared to date. As a result, thought it might be interesting to provide some additional context on where the diagram came from.
It all started in a meeting where a talented team was presenting their plan for a potentially high impact initiative. Midway through, they covered the measurable results they expected to achieve in three years. Granted, they were being somewhat conservative, but their objectives were still way off what I would have expected them to be targeting based on the addressable opportunity and the assets we were bringing to the table.
Without hesitation, I challenged the team to increase their long-term goal by roughly 20x. Regardless of whether or not they could hit the target (which I think they can), the point was to get them thinking much bigger, without constraints, and to start by asking the question, "What would it take...?"
Dream Big
Oftentimes, my favorite exchanges are with people who are naturally predisposed to think at truly massive scale and without limitations. When well reasoned, that kind of vision can be highly inspirational, change the way teams solve for a specific opportunity or challenge, and ultimately, transform the trajectory of a company. During this particular meeting, I ended up writing down two simple words to capture this quality: "Dream big," with the intention of cascading the theme more broadly.
Get Sh*t Done
Almost immediately after seeing those words in writing, I realized the message was incomplete.The team leading the discussion that day may have been conservative in their approach to articulating what was possible, but they were also highly capable and credible -- and had a proven track record of delivering results. Demanding excellence is an important value for us. It's something I would never want taken for granted or crowded out by the singular objective of thinking at scale. Asking people to dream big without delivering on the vision was not only an incomplete sentiment, it could carry the unintended consequence of producing pie-in-the-sky thinking without anything to show for it.
If a goal is truly visionary, it's going to be confronted by doubters, skeptics, and those threatened by its realization. As a result, there will always be walls put up on the way to achieving the objective. Some of the most capable people I've worked with know how to go over, around, or straight through those walls by virtue of their resourcefulness and sheer force of will. In other words, they just "get sh*t done."
I added those three words to my notes, drew overlapping circles around "Get sh*t done" and "Dream big", and thought about how invaluable it is to work with people at the intersection of the two.
Know How to Have Fun
It then occurred to me that I've known a number of people who embodied the ability to dream big and get sh*t done, but who also proved very difficult to work with. Perhaps shielded by the immense value they brought to their respective organizations, they never cultivated the ability to manage compassionately, or even cared to. Rather, they did things their way and expected everyone around them to adapt accordingly. More often than not, that's exactly what people did.
While this has clearly proven to work at some now legendary companies, it's not an easily scalable or reproducible model, it's not necessary, and in my opinion, it's not fun (I say in my opinion because there are those who will argue that winning is fun, regardless of the means employed).
I've reached a point in my career where I want to be surrounded by people who not only share a vision, but a genuine commitment to upholding their company's culture and values. They are team players, don't take themselves too seriously, and "know how to have fun." And with that, I added a third circle to the Venn diagram.
At the nexus of these three circles are the people I most enjoy working with. I'm extraordinarily grateful to have the opportunity to do that every day.
Loved this quick story I read today:
A man on the floor in a factory stands, not doing any work. CEO comes up and asks his salary. The man replies - $1000.
The CEO pulls out his wallet, gives the man $1,000 and says - here's your month salary. I pay people to work here. Get out and never come back ! The man leaves. The CEO asks workers - who was this guy ?
They reply - a pizza delivery man. -- Knee-jerk is never good...
A man on the floor in a factory stands, not doing any work. CEO comes up and asks his salary. The man replies - $1000.
The CEO pulls out his wallet, gives the man $1,000 and says - here's your month salary. I pay people to work here. Get out and never come back ! The man leaves. The CEO asks workers - who was this guy ?
They reply - a pizza delivery man. -- Knee-jerk is never good...
Wanted to share an article by Jane Watson that was tagged by Gordon Mackenzie, and Executive and Performance Coach
Why It’s REALLY Important That We Lose the Sloppy ‘Culture’ Thinking
I keep seeing blog posts, articles, webinars and presentations directed at HR people that use the word ‘culture’ to mean a whole variety of superficial, simple things that are not culture. These articles are often advancing the idea that culture can and should be changed to give an organization a competitive advantage, increase engagement, decrease turnover etc etc.
But this sloppy thinking about what culture is, means that prescriptions based upon that thinking are at best half-baked, and sometimes total nonsense (sorry, but I don’t think that’s an exaggeration). If HR is going to claim (or be handed) yet another mantle, that of ‘Organizational Culture expert’, then we need to do much, much better at defining what culture is, what it is not, and to think critically about why, if and how organizational culture change efforts should be undertaken.
Let’s Avoid This Sloppy Thinking About Culture!
This is a handful of the sloppiest ideas that are floating around out there like bad viruses. Avoid the sloppy!
1. Culture Must be Homogeneous Across the Organization
I’ve read stuff that takes as its underlying premise that an organization’s culture needs to be uniform across the entire workforce in order for leaders to effectively change, harness and use culture as an advantage.
Warning: If you are employed in a place where the culture is uniform across the entire workforce, I regret to inform you that you are not part of an organization, you are a part of a cult. Don’t drink that glass of Kool-aid! Don’t marry Tom Cruise! Just pack your bag and get out now. And then repeat after me: culture is not uniform, it is not monolithic, because organizations are made up of human beings, not robots.
Nor should you want your organization’s culture to be uniform:
“We’re an innovative technology company with a culture that rewards entrepreneurial risk-takers. Our whole finance team really embraces the culture- three of them went to jail last week!”
Internal inconsistencies and subcultures exist within any culture- and usually that’s okay. The sub-culture in a department or team encourages identification amongst members of that team, it can bind groups together, and it’s often adaptive for that particular group, given the demands and constraints of their specialized function.
2. Having a Team Building or Social Event is a Great way to Change Culture
Oh boy, where to start with this one….
Warning: Sending your employees on a team-building social event will not change your culture any more than sending the Amish to a movie will change theirs. Social events can (theoretically anyway) impact morale and team dynamics, but that is not the same thing as culture! Culture is not so superficial that a couple of events can create any kind of lasting, strategic change.
And frankly, if your CEO thinks it’s a good idea to spend a bunch of cash on social events as a strategy to produce the vaguely defined outcome of ‘culture change’ , you have bigger problems than your organizational culture…
3. HR Can Change an Organization’s Culture
I wish this one were true, but it is definitely not. Just like employee engagement, retention and a host of other initiatives that (for better or worse) get handed to HR, we cannot hope to implement culture change alone. Because culture is enacted, dynamic and crowd-sourced, culture change should be thought of less like surgery, and more like conducting an orchestra, where the players are creating something together. You can’t just unilaterally change culture; you need your ‘players’ to willingly start playing a new tune.
Why It’s REALLY Important That We Lose the Sloppy ‘Culture’ Thinking
I keep seeing blog posts, articles, webinars and presentations directed at HR people that use the word ‘culture’ to mean a whole variety of superficial, simple things that are not culture. These articles are often advancing the idea that culture can and should be changed to give an organization a competitive advantage, increase engagement, decrease turnover etc etc.
But this sloppy thinking about what culture is, means that prescriptions based upon that thinking are at best half-baked, and sometimes total nonsense (sorry, but I don’t think that’s an exaggeration). If HR is going to claim (or be handed) yet another mantle, that of ‘Organizational Culture expert’, then we need to do much, much better at defining what culture is, what it is not, and to think critically about why, if and how organizational culture change efforts should be undertaken.
Let’s Avoid This Sloppy Thinking About Culture!
This is a handful of the sloppiest ideas that are floating around out there like bad viruses. Avoid the sloppy!
1. Culture Must be Homogeneous Across the Organization
I’ve read stuff that takes as its underlying premise that an organization’s culture needs to be uniform across the entire workforce in order for leaders to effectively change, harness and use culture as an advantage.
Warning: If you are employed in a place where the culture is uniform across the entire workforce, I regret to inform you that you are not part of an organization, you are a part of a cult. Don’t drink that glass of Kool-aid! Don’t marry Tom Cruise! Just pack your bag and get out now. And then repeat after me: culture is not uniform, it is not monolithic, because organizations are made up of human beings, not robots.
Nor should you want your organization’s culture to be uniform:
“We’re an innovative technology company with a culture that rewards entrepreneurial risk-takers. Our whole finance team really embraces the culture- three of them went to jail last week!”
Internal inconsistencies and subcultures exist within any culture- and usually that’s okay. The sub-culture in a department or team encourages identification amongst members of that team, it can bind groups together, and it’s often adaptive for that particular group, given the demands and constraints of their specialized function.
2. Having a Team Building or Social Event is a Great way to Change Culture
Oh boy, where to start with this one….
Warning: Sending your employees on a team-building social event will not change your culture any more than sending the Amish to a movie will change theirs. Social events can (theoretically anyway) impact morale and team dynamics, but that is not the same thing as culture! Culture is not so superficial that a couple of events can create any kind of lasting, strategic change.
And frankly, if your CEO thinks it’s a good idea to spend a bunch of cash on social events as a strategy to produce the vaguely defined outcome of ‘culture change’ , you have bigger problems than your organizational culture…
3. HR Can Change an Organization’s Culture
I wish this one were true, but it is definitely not. Just like employee engagement, retention and a host of other initiatives that (for better or worse) get handed to HR, we cannot hope to implement culture change alone. Because culture is enacted, dynamic and crowd-sourced, culture change should be thought of less like surgery, and more like conducting an orchestra, where the players are creating something together. You can’t just unilaterally change culture; you need your ‘players’ to willingly start playing a new tune.
One of my fav things to have read this week was this Top 100 List of Companies great HR from Hunt Scanlon Media. Want to get on the list next time. Contact us and we'll get ya on your way, with the great feedback your employees will provide to them about working at your company! Parts of this article were removed, let's be honest, its long, but really good. For the full article, go to this link: http://huntscanlon.com/100-companies-excel-hr/.
100 Companies That Excel In HR
Workforce magazine’s annual ranking of businesses that excel in human resources is out. Usual suspects like Google and Facebook continue to set the standard for excellence, but there were some surprises as well. Let’s go inside the just-released list and discover what it takes to make the grade.June 23, 2017 – How best to gauge the effectiveness of a human resources department? For the last four years, Workforce magazine has issued its rankings of the “world’s top companies for HR.” This year, like last, in its list of 100 companies, the publication rated Google at No. 1, followed, in order, by Facebook, Coca-Cola, Deloitte and AT&T. Twenty-eight companies have made the list all four years.
Twenty-five firms – Ultimate Software, West Monroe Partners and LaSalle Network, to name a few – joined them in this year’s rankings for the first time. But how did the magazine arrive at such conclusions? What makes for excellence in human resources? Joined by the staff of its research arm, Workforce’s editors settled on seven main areas: workplace culture, employee benefits, diversity and inclusion, employee development-talent management, HR innovation, leadership development and talent acquisition.
“To realize the importance of these categories and take action to improve them pushes a company from good to great,” said the magazine.
To create the rankings, Workforce researchers developed a statistical formula to analyze publicly available data on HR performance and cull what they consider the best companies, the magazine said. The research team then used what workers at the businesses had to say, provided by Glassdoor Inc., the job review website, and stirred that into the mix.
Workforce 100 Performance Index
100 Companies That Excel In HR
Workforce magazine’s annual ranking of businesses that excel in human resources is out. Usual suspects like Google and Facebook continue to set the standard for excellence, but there were some surprises as well. Let’s go inside the just-released list and discover what it takes to make the grade.June 23, 2017 – How best to gauge the effectiveness of a human resources department? For the last four years, Workforce magazine has issued its rankings of the “world’s top companies for HR.” This year, like last, in its list of 100 companies, the publication rated Google at No. 1, followed, in order, by Facebook, Coca-Cola, Deloitte and AT&T. Twenty-eight companies have made the list all four years.
Twenty-five firms – Ultimate Software, West Monroe Partners and LaSalle Network, to name a few – joined them in this year’s rankings for the first time. But how did the magazine arrive at such conclusions? What makes for excellence in human resources? Joined by the staff of its research arm, Workforce’s editors settled on seven main areas: workplace culture, employee benefits, diversity and inclusion, employee development-talent management, HR innovation, leadership development and talent acquisition.
“To realize the importance of these categories and take action to improve them pushes a company from good to great,” said the magazine.
To create the rankings, Workforce researchers developed a statistical formula to analyze publicly available data on HR performance and cull what they consider the best companies, the magazine said. The research team then used what workers at the businesses had to say, provided by Glassdoor Inc., the job review website, and stirred that into the mix.
Workforce 100 Performance Index
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1. Google
2. Facebook Inc. 3. Coca-Cola Co. 4. Deloitte 5. AT&T Inc. 6. Walt Disney Co. 7. Marriott International Inc. 8. Comcast Corp. 9. Goldman Sachs 10. Apple Inc. 11. Intel Corp. 12. Nike Inc. 13. KPMG 14. Accenture 15. Wells Fargo & Co. 16. American Express Inc. 17. Southwest Airlines Co. 18. Cisco Systems Inc. 19. Ultimate Software 20. Delta Air Lines Inc. 21. Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. 22. Lockheed Martin Corp. 23. Boston Consulting Group 24. Johnson & Johnson 25. Capital One Financial Corp. |
26. Boeing
27. Starbucks Corp. 28. FedEx Corp. 29. Hyatt Hotels Corp. 30. USAA 31. West Monroe Partners 32. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. 33. Prudential Financial Inc. 34. Genentech Inc. 35. Salesforce.com Inc. 36. Nielsen 37. 3M Co. 38. LaSalle Network 39. Wegmans Food Markets Inc. 40. Cerner Corp. 41. EY 42. Verizon Communications 43. JPMorgan Chase & Co. 44. Quicken Loans Inc. 45. Aon 46. Mayo Clinic 47. Procter & Gamble Co. 48. Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. 49. SAS Institute Inc. 50. Cigna |
51. Hitachi Data Systems
52. JM Family Enterprises Inc. 53. Enterprise Holdings Inc. 54. Toyota North America 55. Texas Health Resources 56. CDW 57. Mars Inc. 58. Hyland Software Inc. 59. Intuitive Research and Technology 60. Kaiser Permanente 61. IBM Corp. 62. Monsanto Co. 63. Aetna Inc. 64. Navy Federal Credit Union 65. Publix Super Markets Inc. 66. American Fidelity Assurance Co. 67. T-Mobile 68. Baptist Health South Florida 69. CBRE Group Inc. 70. Bank of America 71. Nordstrom Inc. 72. Lego Group 73. BASF 74. Roche Diagnostics 75. Merck & Co |
76. Atlantic Health System
77. Paycor, Inc. 78. Orrick 79. JetBlue Airways 80. Edward Jones 81. Humana Inc. 82. VF Corp. 83. MasterCard Inc. 84. Scripps Health 85. Fluor Corp. 86. Northrop Grumman Corp. 87. Synchrony Financial 88. Paychex Inc. 89. Hormel Foods Corp. 90. EMC Corp. 91. TELUS Communications Corp. 92. Grant Thornton 93. Southern Co. 94. Dow Chemical Co. 95. Dell Inc. 96. TIAA 97. ADP 98. Amazon.com Inc. 99. General Motors 100. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina |